On Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman yesterday David Miliband, Labour leadership contender, former foreign secretary and the apple of Hilary Clinton’s eye, slipped a little under the scrutiny, a rare occurrence for him. Paxman wasn’t particularly cutting, simply asked Miliband whether he thought his brother Ed, also running for leader of the former incumbent party, would do a good job of it. “I don’t want to say anything negative here Jeremy,” Miliband the elder uttered, to which Paxman rightly replied “I’m not asking you to”.
Where might this compulsion to state negatives have possibly come from?
Sibling rivalry has always been characterised as a means of grabbing the most parental resources as possible away from the other, to secure your monopoly over the paedocratic (as in paedocracy, regime led by children) kingdom of a Mother’s affection, and it can rear its competitive head in many ways.
One unnamed crackers genetic determinist put it:
Parental resources are finite, and if one brother gets a large proportion of parental time, attention, and money, then this necessarily means that the other brother will be getting less.
Stereotypes abound, the job of competing for the affection of the Miliband boys’ Father, the Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband, author of books such as The State in Capitalist Society, would surely have been met with disdain, particularly with regards to Father Miliband’s political commitment to egalitarianism and equal distribution – the sibling rivalry of the brother’s surely would’ve been seen as nothing short of capitalist doctrine consuming their innocent souls like cows branded for ownership proof.
Other sibling rivals like Christopher and Peter Hitchens do battle with ideas – the former once being famous for his firebrand left wing politics, now shoved to one side for the pursuit of a militant atheism and insistence on the benefits of the Iraq war, while the latter brother sits himself on the right wing politically, born again in his Christianity and fully opposed to military intervention in the Middle East.
David and Ed play the nice game, but the elder brother’s small, but telling, admission with Paxman puts another thorn in the side of those who feel that sibling rivalry is just a load of ol’ poppy.
For those of us who have any optimism for the Labour party, that it should bin its recent past with dignity, doing away with those things to which parallels can be drawn with Shakespeare’s As You Like It – “All the world’s a stage” when it comes to our neo-imperialist adventures, or “too much of a good thing” with the thirteen years of New Labour flirtation with the neo-liberal vacuum – ought to be careful what we wish for the future; might the brother’s Miliband be playing the parts of rival siblings Orlando and Oliver, where jealously prevails over a divisive inheritance?

by Carl Packman

You can read more of Carl’s thoughts and articles on his blog Raincoat Optimism.